Happy Tree Friends goes long....

Set your Tivos. Our buddies at Mondo have been working hard with Canadian company Fat Kat on the new long format Happy Tree Friends television series. It’s finally premiered on G4’s Midnight Spank. The show is broken up into 3 episodes that follow the characters through various sweet fun filled scenarios that ultimately end in tragedy. Good times!

Ghostbot had the benefit of designing and animating the opening credits and interstitials for the new series. Creator of the series, Kenn Navarro came up with a concept to do a pop-up book to open the show. Many pop-up books were maimed trying to figure out a way to replicate the mechanics in Flash. We’ll post the full opening credits some time in the future. In the mean time, check out some of our pop-ups and a peek at a new episode here.

60 GB Hard-Knocks Drive

Recently, Chris Battle blogged about the unfortunate experience of having his hard drive crash. Since I immensely admire Chris's work and his illustrious career, I decided it would be a good move to crash my hard drive as well.

1.5-years of blood, sweat, and tears on a candybar-sized piece of metal

Well, not really. It actually was the worst possible thing that could've happened when it did. Picture this:

(At 1 a.m. one Sunday morning)

Me: "Wow I finished almost a day before our early morning, Monday delivery for this super-difficult, high-profile project. I better back up my files on my trusty iPod just in case. Because I'm screwed if I lose everything since it only exists on this computer."

[sound of me happily typing an email to the rest of the gang telling them that I was done as I begin transferring files]

[sudden zapping sound of my laptop shutting off]

Me (now sweating): "Uh...heh...what...?..."

Laptop: "..."

iPod: "It wasn't me..."

Fortunately, thanks to a heavy heaping of divine intervention and classic Ghostbot Rescue Team Procedures, we were able to make our deadline with a few hours to spare. What was more painful, however, was the actual act of recovering my drive. I had about 80% of the data backed up on an external drive, but that last 20% was some of the most important information on my computer (emails, pitches, Six Scoop Sketches!). Moral of the story is back up your work, folks - frequently. If you don't believe me, I can send you a copy of my bill from Data Recovery Group.

Thanks to the reality-kick-in-the-pants, I thought I'd post some Painter sketches that I forgot I had which I recently "re-found" amidst the recovered data. (Consider it another form of back up in case this happens again.)

Ok, so maybe it wasn't worth the cost, but dangit I needed those emails…